LX arrived super fast! Thanks for the extra effort with the postage Mark. Above and beyond
Got the whole weekend to play now
now, where'd I put that little 77 1.8...

Fantastic Alan! Have you sent offered them to the media?

Smeggy, smegster, the smegmeister, smeggeroony, smegg.... sorry,
have you considered the K5IIs purely for noise reduction? I'm finding the images so sharp natively, that I don't have to post sharpen at all, so noise isn't accentuated. It's a nice little bonus that I hadn't considered till I started working on the images and I reckon it's worth another stop

I like 3. Not because she's pretty (tho that helps), but because it's a nice composition, nice colours and good focus, making good use of the lens' characteristics. Genuine quality.
The others have a snap shot quality, and the last is a fail really IMO

Lol. Yeah, that wasn't lost on me when I wrote it

I just bought the Chipmunk BL-500 from BatteryLogic
Cheap as chips and currently evening out all my eneloops with it's individual charging and LED levels display. Discovered that some of the batteries in my well charged packs of 4 are actually nearly flat.
Comes with a car adapter for charging in the field. It's Ace!

The dodging and burning is a bit much and leaves halos over the trees etc. pet hate
you appear to have a good version of that lens tho'.

I think the issue was 'inconsistent' metering on the K5. That would definitely be intolerable and a reason to upgrade. I have experienced this a lot on my K5. I always assume these things are me, but I don't remember the K10d doing it.

I had the Sigma and swapped it for the FA77 1.8 ltd.
No contest! the Sigma was too big (fine for weddings, everywhere else it just got left at home) and the focus seemed to be a bit unreliable. At the time I put that down to me, but the 77 has no such issues - it's a little gem.
Sigma will loose money instantly, so an expensive choice potentially.
With the Sigma, my photographs didn't improve; with the 77 they instantly stepped up to a different level - the same way that the K5IIs changed the game in terms of sharpness.
No experience of the FA 85.

I think you would have trouble beating that 50 1.7
The 135 3.5 will get you further back, and my copy is one of the sharpest lenses I own wide open, which always helps for eyes etc. (you can easily soften an image from a good lens, but you'll never get a poor one sharp)